Saturday, February 19, 2011

Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio

Guillermo del Toro will be producing his stop motion version of Pinocchio later this year. Matthew Robbins will be writing the screenplay. The illustrator Gris Grimly and Fantastic Mr Fox animation director Mark Gustafson will co-direct the new version of Pinocchio.
MacKinnon and Saunders, the UK Company behind the stop-motion characters seen in The Fantastic Mr. Fox and Tim Burton's Corpse Bride, will be bringing the various different characters of Pinocchio's world to life.

Guillermo del Toro had the following to say about the upcoming project:

"There has to be darkness in any fairy tale or children's narrative work, something the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen and Walt Disney understood. We tend to call something Disney-fied, but a lot of people forget how powerfully disturbing the best animated Disney movies are, including those kids being turned into donkeys in Pinocchio. What we're trying to do is present a Pinocchio that is more faithful to the take that Carlo Collodi wrote. That is more surreal and slightly darker than what we've seen before."